You want me to go where??

One day in 2007 a bronze sculpture suddenly appeared in the water between the Fondamente Nove and the island of San Michele.

It represents two men standing in a boat, one of them pointing somewhere important.

If there had been an announcement about this innovation, I missed it, because I was compelled to try to figure out what it was all by myself.

I failed; in fact, I didn’t even come close.  My main theory was that it was Saint Francis with one of his disciples.  Logic!  Because it is said — or even known — that in 1220 the “Poverello,” returning from the Fifth Crusade, stopped in the Lagoon and founded a hermitage on the little island now known as San Francesco del Deserto.

I was slightly troubled by the consideration that if the armless man in bronze were St. Francis, why wasn’t his companion pointing to the island he adopted — or toward Venice, at least?  The statue is pointing more toward Murano, but that makes no sense, even if it is something from the Biennale, whose components are not supposed to make sense.

Then I thought it might be some representation of Tennyson’s “The Lotos-Eaters”:  “Courage!” he said, and pointed toward the land, / “This mounting wave will roll us shoreward soon.” / In the afternoon they came unto a land / In which it seemed always afternoon.”  Mounting wave: check.  Plenty of those.  It’s a start.

But now I know the truth, and it’s more troubling than ignorance.  Perhaps you’ve noticed that truth can be that way.

This pair of metallic men floating in what appears to be a pistachio shell is a creation of a Russian artist, Georgy Frangulyan, and it is known as “Dante’s Barque.”

Excuse me?

In the early 1300’s, a Florentine pharmacist and poet named Dante Alighieri took a trip to Hell — not the Piazza San Marco at noon on a summer Sunday, but the other Hell — in the company of the ghost of Virgil, the famous Roman poet, who acted as guide and fixer. They also went to Purgatory and Paradise, and he wrote the trip up in “The Divine Comedy.”

I knew all that a long time ago, but I never imagined that the creation installed in the Venetian lagoon depicted an interlude in the allegorical travels of the Supreme Poet and the author of the Aeneid — specifically, their preparation to be rowed across the Acheron, a boiling river of damned souls.  Many congratulations to all.

There’s just one thing.  Who came up with the idea that it would be cool to position a big statue showing two men heading for Hell pointing at the cemetery?

It was bad enough when the city’s funeral launches, which carry the coffins to the graveyard, had a big sticker on the stern bearing the name of the city’s garbage collection service.  Thank God they finally stopped that.

But this isn’t much better.  It isn’t any better.  I realize we live in an era which has been deformed by irony and mockery, but that’s no excuse.

If I had to accompany my mother’s body to the cemetery, I would never want to know that those two characters are Dante and Virgil.  You could tell me they’re George and Gracie; you could tell me they’re Crick and Watson; you could tell me they’re two of the Flying Karamazov Brothers.

But I’d appreciate your just leaving Dante out of it.